Hollywood Got the Hillary Memo

Hollywood is already caving in to liberal guilt over its capitulation to North Korean intimidation, apparently agreeing with Hillary Clinton that we need to empathize with our enemies. In an article out this afternoon in the LA Weekly that ostensibly laments giving in to threats, it isn’t long before the article goes full tilt boogie for liberal guilt:

The movie about a talk TV crew’s CIA-initiated plot to assassinate a living state leader, in this case Kim Jong-un, is also nearly without peer—nearly.

Emily Carman, assistant professor of film and media arts at Chapman University, says Hollywood received pressure from the Chinese government in 1932 and 1933 with the releases of Shanghai Express and The Bitter Tea of General Yen, respectively.

The films featured white actors in yellowface as well as interracial relationships. “It was a racist, Eurocentric view of China,” Carman said.

Leaders threatened to block film distribution in China, but Hollywood did not back down, she said.

The Interview also hits a familiar note of insensitivity toward an Asian nation. Before that, in 2001, the Ben Stiller comedy Zoolander featured a plot about a fashion model recruited to assassinate the prime minister of Malaysia. That nation and neighboring Singapore banned its exhibition.

“Can you imagine the outcry if North Korea released, Get Obama, about the assassination of a sitting president,” asks Douglas Thomas, associate professor of communication at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

“It’s amazing that this even got green-lit,” Carman adds. “Wow, nothing’s really changed. This is still a white male, Western-centric view of a small Asian nation.” (Emphasis added.)

Let’s think about that Get Obama film idea for a moment. Oh yeah, that’s right: there was a film in 2006 that dramatized the assassination of George W. Bush. Did LA Weekly, Variety, or other Hollywood-centric outlets criticize the film? Au contraire, as they say at the Cannes Film Festival, and probably at Sundance, too. Death of a President got several awards.

Profs. Thomas and Carman need to get a life. If you can’t make fun of North Korean dictators, we should just surrender and recognize Cuba now. Oh, wait. . .